Raising your head and looking at the sky looking to recognize constellations and encounter meteor showers or meteorites is a pleasure, but what the astronomical community has found is simply extraordinary: a beam of cosmic energy directed at Earth from half of the known universe. It’s not the first time we’ve seen something like this, but this is the brightest and most distant ever seen.
The discovery. South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope has discovered the most powerful and distant space laser ever detected. It is a beam of microwaves fired 8 billion years ago that has just arrived at Earth and to locate it, the team needed a cosmic magnifying glass that Einstein predicted more than a century ago.
Context. Hydroxyl megamasers (the prefix mega denotes that their luminosity is millions of times higher than that of an ordinary hydroxyl maser) are natural phenomena that occur when two galaxies collide. At that moment the gas clouds are violently compressed, exciting hydroxyl molecules. These release microwaves in an amplified and coherent way (like artificial lasers).
Simply put, they are the cosmic equivalent of a laser. Of course, instead of visible light, what they emit are microwaves. For astronomy they serve as a kind of “cosmic beacon” used to study how galaxies were formed in the early universe.
to the telescope. This natural laser comes from a pair of colliding galaxies (the HATLAS J142935.3–002836 system) that emit a megamaser so bright that the research team has proposed upgrading it to a gigamaser, an order of magnitude higher.
The person responsible for the discovery is the MeerKAT radio telescope, a network of 64 radio frequency antennas located in South Africa. The signal we receive today was emitted 8 billion years ago, that is, when the Universe was half its current age.
Why is it important. Because megamasers are direct tracers of galactic mergers in the young universe. Their study allows us to determine how they were formed and how they evolved. Furthermore, this proposal to classify it as a “gigamaser” opens the door to more objects similar in size to exist yet to be discovered. As Thato Manamela, astronomer at the University of Pretoria and lead author of the study, details: “This is just the beginning. We don’t want to find a single system, but hundreds or thousands.”
Illustration of the distant galaxy 8 billion light years away (in red), magnified by an unrelated foreground disk galaxy, resulting in a red ring. By breaking radio light into different colors, like a prism does, the hydroxyl gigamaser is revealed. IDIA
How they did it. The microwave signal was too weak to be detected at that distance, but the scientific team made use of something that Einstein envisioned: gravitational lensing. In short: a huge mass located somewhere between Earth and galaxies acts as a natural amplifier, bending space-time around it, that is, bending and concentrating microwaves like a magnifying glass.
What is produced is an Einstein ring, a luminous halo around the intermediate object. That effect amplified the signal enough that MeerKAT could capture the cosmic ray and analyze it.
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